First, remember the formatting trick I mention in all of my posts: if you want to format anything in Excel (in a chart or table) just select it and press Ctrl-1 (Mac: Command-1) to open the formatting dialog specific to that item. And that’s the problem with noise: it distracts you from the essential stuff. But then, they cause my eye to stumble, too. And yet, until I viewed this presentation by Ian Lurie, I was blissfully oblivious to gridlines in charts. If you have read just about anything I’ve written about Excel, you’ll know I loathe gridlines in tables. When you’re presenting data, it’s very important to reduce the noise and hone in on actionable signals. Remove Noise From Your Chart’s Background
If you want a primer, you can find this resource from Microsoft for the PC and this one for the Mac. I’m not going to cover the basics of creating charts in this post. Having covered all the basics of how to make tabular data tell a story using custom cell formatting and conditional formatting for both static tables and pivot tables, we’re now going to jump into the really fun stuff: charting data out in Excel.
